Full Name: Ladis, Andrew
Other Names:
- Andrew Ladis
Gender: male
Date Born: 30 January 1949
Date Died: 02 December 2007
Place Born: Athens, Region of Attica, Greece
Place Died: Athens, Clarke, GA, USA
Home Country/ies: Greece
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance
Overview
Giotto and early Italian Renaissance scholar; Franklin Professor of Art History at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia. Ladis was son of Thomas and Marina Ladis. His family moved to the United States when he was still a child. Ladis attended Thomas Jefferson High School in Richmond, VA. After graduating from the University of Virginia in history in 1970. That year he met William Underwood Eiland (later the the director of the Georgia Museum of Art) who became his life partner. Ladis enter the University of Virginia Law School, beswitch to art history, pursuing his master’s degree, 1974, and Ph.D. at UVa. His dissertatin was accepted in 1978 wrting on the topic of Taddeo Gaddi. He initially taught at Peay State University in Clarksville, TN. His dissertation became the basis for his first book, Taddeo Gaddi: A Critical Review and Catalogue Raisonné, published in 1983. He subsequently taught at State University of New York at Potsdam; Vanderbilt University (as Andrew W. Mellon Fellow), and at Wright State University in Dayton, OH. He was appointed assistant professor at the University of Georgia in 1987; he remained at Georgia the rest of his career. Ladis held the Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at the University of Memphis, and was twice visiting professor at Villa I Tatti in Florence, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. In 1993 he published The Brancacci Chapel, Florence which was awarded the University of Georgia’s Creative Research Medal. In 2001 his collected studies, Studies in Italian Art, appeared. Ladis contracted cancer and died at age 58 at a hospice in Athens, Georgia. Two books appeared posthumously, Fools of Fortune: Victims and Villains in Vasari’s “Lives” in 2008, and Giotto’s “O”: Narrative, Figuration, and Pictorial Ingenuity in the Arena Chapel. Ladis was a major scholar of Giotto di Bondone, the founder of the Florentine school. He was greatly influenced by the New York University scholar Richard Offner for whom he edited a memorial volume. Like Offner, he spearheaded a corpus of Italian paintings for his region of the United States. His catalogue raisonné on Taddeo Gaddi was the first major study of that artist in English.
Selected Bibliography
[dissesrtation:] Taddeo Gaddi: Style and Chronology. University of Virginia, 1978; edited, with Wood, Carolyn. The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Workshop. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995; Giotto’s O: Narrative, Figuration, and Pictorial Ingenuity in the Arena Chapel. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008; edited, with Roberts, Perri Lee. Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections: The South. Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, the University of Georgia, 2009.
Sources
[obituaries;] Classic Ground [website] http://classicground.blogspot.com/2007/12/andrew-ladis-d-2007;